Mr. Petulengro and his family by the door of his tent.  Mr. Petulengro soon began talking of the letter which I had received in the morning.  “Is it not from Miss Berners, brother?” said he.  I told him it was.  “Is she coming back, brother?” “Never,” said I; “she is gone to America, and has deserted me.”  “I always knew that you two were never destined for each other,” said he.  “How did you know that?” I inquired.  “The dook told me so, brother; you are born to be a great traveller.”  “Well,” said I, “if I had gone with her to America, as I was thinking of doing, I should have been a great traveller.”  “You are to travel in another direction, brother,” said he.  “I wish you would tell me all about my future wanderings,” said I.  “I can’t, brother,” said Mr. Petulengro, “there’s a power of clouds before my eye.”  “You are a poor seer, after all,” said I, and getting up, I retired to my dingle and my tent, where I betook myself to my bed, and there, knowing the worst, and being no longer agitated by apprehension, nor agonised by expectation, I was soon buried in a deep slumber, the first which I had fallen into for several nights.

Footnotes: 

{1} He was christened George Henry, but he dropped the Henry, as, Tobias George Smollett dropped his George.

{2} Dafydd ab Gwilym, “the greatest genius of the Cimbric race and one of the first poets of the world.”  See Wild Wales, chap. lxxxvi., for a very interesting account of this “Welsh Ovid.”

{5} Elsewhere he writes to John Murray:  “What a contemptible trade is the author’s compared with that of the jockey!”

{8} For a useful, if more commonplace and merely bibliographical study of Sir Richard Phillipps, see W. E. A. Axon’s Stray Chapters, 1888, p. 237.

{12} This is no less true of Borrow’s still earlier book The Zincali, An Account of the Gypsies of Spain (1841)—­a book which every true Borrovian will carefully assimilate, if only for these reasons:  First, it supplies a key to much of his later work, many of the greatest qualities of which may here be found in embryo.  Secondly, it contains some of the finest descriptive passages in the English tongue, notably the account of the Gitana of Seville.

{20a} The beer he got was seldom to his taste; he called it “swipes,” but went on drinking glass after glass.  What a figure he must have made in the bar parlour of the Bald-faced Stag at Roehampton, with his tales of Jerry Abershaw, Ambrose Gwinett, Thurtell and Wainewright!  Mr. Watts-Dunton says he had the gift of drinking deeply, but he adds “of the waters of life,” a refinement which Borrow himself might have deprecated.

{20b} Henry Hall Dixon.